Monitor allows you to track and analyze 15 social media channels, TV & radio, 270,000 global news sources, print media, and over 20,000 podcasts. Once you set up your Explore searches, tags, media lists, or RSS feeds you will be able to stay informed of news articles the minute they break. This real-time awareness enables you to promptly respond to and engage with the content emerging from your searches, keeping you at the forefront of developments.
This guide below will cover the following topics:
Getting Familiar with Monitor
Prerequisites
Before creating and saving a Monitor stream, you must have at least one Explore Search and Media List saved. Learn more about Creating a Search and Creating a Media List.
Setting up Monitor
When you first visit Monitor, you will see a screen like the above. To create a Monitor Stream, follow these steps:
Select Monitor from the left-hand navigation bar
Click Create Monitoring View
Select your inputs
Note: You will see that you have access to 5 total streams of content at a time. Each stream can have up to 5 inputs.
Click into any stream option (one, two, three, four or five) to add content.
Select OK
Your Untitled view will populate with the content selected.
You will need to save this view to access it in the future, see the next section on how to do this. Learn more about Saving a Monitor View.
To refresh your content, click refresh to the right of the date section. By default, we will automatically refresh content at 1-minute intervals, but you may choose from manually refreshing, or from 1, 5 and 10 minute intervals.
Note: If you’ve used Monitor to view your content before but haven’t saved a View, you might not see the welcome screen as depicted above. This is because Monitor will return you to the last content you were viewing each time you open the app. To create a new view in Monitor, click the create new button from the kebab menu.
Possibly Sensitive Content warns you if the content populating in your streams might not be suitable. Sensitive content can be automatically blurred. To expose the content, click Show or click the article. To opt out of this, please contact your Meltwater contact.
Saving a Monitor View
To save a Monitor view
Select the Save drop-down in the top right-hand corner
Click Save as
Enter a name for your Monitor view. This will enable you to access this view in the future from the drop-down menu.
Saved views will appear under the drop-down located in the top left of the toolbar.
Return back to the Monitor Landing Page by selecting the back arrow to view your saved view there. Learn more about the Monitoring Landing Page.
When you click on the drop-down, you will be able to:
See recently accessed and saved Views
Delete or favorite the current view
View all Labels, Explore Searches, Tags, Media Lists, and Author Lists
Note: Monitoring Views are shared with all users of an account, similar to saved filter sets. For accounts with Workspaces management enabled, they can be partitioned into user groups. Learn more about Workspaces.
Sorting and Managing Stream Content
There are a variety of options in your streams in order to help you sort, manage and otherwise take action on relevant content.
Use the icons at the top of each stream to sort and manage the content.
⬇ Download - Choose to download a CSV or PDF of the coverage you've selected. To learn more about this export option, read this article.
Display - Choose between Default and Compact. Compact provides more content per stream without scrolling by removing all details except the title and preview message.
Duplicates Settings - Choose to group the items within your content stream by 'exact matches', 'similar matches', or 'don't group items'. Learn more about Duplicate Articles and Grouping Options.
Hidden Articles - This will display any articles that have been hidden by users on your account. You’ll need to click this button again to hide these articles.
Sort - By default, the content stream is sorted chronologically. Checking the box for Ascending will reverse the order of sorting for the chosen sorting option.
Sorting options always default back to date (most recent displayed first) when you change your search.
Meltwater offers different options that allow you to change the way content is sorted:
Date: displays the most recent items first.
Country: displays the most recent countries first.
Sentiment: groups and displays by Positive, Neutral, Negative, Not Rated.
Language: groups and displays by most recent language first.
Reach: displays the items with the highest viewership on top.
Relevance: displays the most applicable items first. Relevance is based on an algorithm that takes the prominence, reach, and age of the article into account.
Geo: displays items by their country (the country is listed in the header of the item; some items may not be associated with one particular country).
Engagement: displays items that have the highest aggregated engagement numbers, (e.g threads, shares, reactions).
Prominence: displays items by term frequency. Term frequency means how many times a particular word appears in a text, divided by how many words exist in the text.
Social Echo: displays items that have the highest social echo. Social Echo is the number of X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook shares of an editorial article.
Views: displays items that have the highest number of X views. Views simply count when any user has viewed a X (formerly Twitter) post. Sorting by X Views is also available for content streams in Explore and Analyze. For editorial content, viewership is estimated.
NewsGuard Rating: Reliability ratings for news outlets based on nonpartisan journalistic criteria.
🔍 Find - Clicking on the Find option's magnifying glass icon will open up a text bar; with which you may search within the stream for names, keywords, sources, and print page numbers.
Filtering Monitoring Views
Filters in Monitor allow you to get a more focused stream without switching your view and match the granularity of Explore's filters.
You can filter by:
Geographic Region-Specific Filters: Understand your results narrowed down by region, language, reach, and content type.
Note: Location filters are currently country-based.
Sentiment and Channel Filters: Apply filters to your Monitoring Views to drill down into a content stream by positive sentiment on X, or negative sentiment on editorial content, without changing the Explore search.
Channel, Keyword, and Author Filters: Apply a cross-section of author lists and channel as a filter on your continuous content stream, empowering you to harness potential media opportunities as they emerge.
To filter your monitoring views, follow these steps:
Click Monitor in the left-hand navigation bar
Open a saved Monitoring View
Select the Filter icon to select content filters
Note: If you save your Monitoring View with filters applied, your filters will be remembered for next time.
Click Ok
Your updated content stream in Monitor will display active filters
Additional Article Actions
For each article, social post, or other piece of content, you will see action icons on the result cards. They enable you to:
Author name - when clicked, author names open the author’s profile preview.
Open author profile - when the encircled person icon is clicked, it opens the author’s profile preview on the right. Editorial authors and X (formerly Twitter) handles open different profile previews.
↗ Open in a new tab - loads the full page of the content within a new browser tab
Content analysis - opens a card with insights that allow you to qualify and identify relevant content faster by surfacing the top entities, entity-level sentiment, author profile, and X (formerly Twitter) engagement in one consolidated view. Learn more Content Analysis Cards.
Note: This is only available in editorial content w/ reach & X posts.
Add to Newsletter - add an article directly to a Newsletter. Learn more about Adding Content to Your Newsletter from Monitor.
Tag - apply tags to content in order to group all types of documents. Tagged content can be used to set up dashboards, distribute newsletters, and power streams in Monitor.
Kebab menu - share an individual article:
Share (via email)
Post to X (formerly Twitter)
Post to Facebook
Post to LinkedIn
Create an impact report
Translate
Hide
Sentiment override - by clicking on the sentiment button in the bottom right side of the result cards, you can override the sentiment if we made a mistake.
Actions for Bulk-selected Content
If more than one article or other content is selected, you will be see additional action icons:
☺ Sentiment - Allowing you to change the positive, neutral or negative rating assigned to the selected articles. This change will be reflected on the same articles when used within your reporting, tags, and exports.
Share - This allows you to share the article via email to another email address. Learn more about Sharing Articles from Meltwater.
Note: You can only share up to 100 articles.
Add to Newsletter - add an article directly to a Newsletter. Learn more about Adding Content to Your Newsletter from Monitor.
Tag - apply tags to content in order to group all types of documents. Tagged content can be used to set up dashboards, distribute newsletters, and power streams in Monitor.
Hide - Removes the article selected from your results across the whole platform. Note that this includes other searches and reporting.
Download Options
CSV
Excel
PDF
Learn more about Exporting Content.
Kebab menu - share articles:
Post to X (formerly Twitter)
Post to Facebook
Post to LinkedIn
Translate
Adjusting a Date Range, Refreshing & Adding Streams
In the top right-hand corner of Monitor, there are four options on the toolbar.
Modifying the Date Range
Select the date range for which you’re interested in seeing content. This will apply to all streams and will be persisted among different searches. Remember to save your View to remember any new selections, if needed. Choose from one of the available options.
After you select a custom date range, recent custom date ranges will be available in the date picker.
Using the Since Last Viewed Feature
To help you save time and only see new content, there is a date filter, Since last viewed. When you select this date option, you will see only the new content that has appeared since the last time you were here. You can save the selection in your View so each time you return, it will be applied.
Refreshing your Streams
Click to refresh all of your streams at once, allowing new content to update in each!
We will automatically refresh your streams at 1-minute intervals, but you can change that in the dropdown by the refresh button in the toolbar.
When you refresh your streams manually or automatically, we will show new document indicators, showing where the content has appeared:
Adding Additional Streams
You can add additional streams by clicking on the Add streams Button in the Top Toolbar or:
Click into the '+' column beside the content stream
Select the Searches, RSS Feeds, Tags, Media or Author Lists to be displayed within your additional content stream
Select Ok
You can repeat this process to have up to five streams in total.
Edit an Existing Content Stream
Now that you have your monitor created - you may want to edit your stream to change your selected saved searches or add additional ones. In order to do so, follow the steps below:
Select the '+' Add Icon in the upper left hand side of the content stream
Using the tick boxes, select up to five (5) content sources from across searches, tags, RSS feeds, and author & media lists for this stream
Click OK to save your changes
Protip: You can click into each inputs listed at the top of the stream to open a drop-down menu, allowing for editing a specific input in the stream.
Highest Syndication Reach: News articles with duplicates in your content stream will now surface the version with the highest syndicated reach.
Click Duplicates
Click on the Content Analysis Card to open the document
Action it with tagging, sharing, posting, and more
Creating Digest Reports and Alerts from Monitor
In the toolbar, you’ll also notice a Create Button. This is where you will be able to take action on your Saved Monitoring View.
Create a Digest Report - Digests are automated email distributions with the latest content results from your saved searches in your monitors. Learn More.
Create Alerts - When viewing content in Monitor, the ‘Create alerts’ feature allows you to quickly set up relevant alerts, all from Monitor. Learn More.
Following People of Interest using Monitor
One of the great features in Monitor is the ability to build out a stream with content from the Media Lists or Author Lists you’ve created. This will enable you to track what the people of interest to you and your organization are sharing or when they are mentioned in social.
In the above fictitious illustration, we can see that two streams are in this view. The one on the left is powered by a Media List composed of electric vehicle journalists, whereas the one on the right is for an Author List containing X (formerly Twitter) authors that write on user experience and design.
Learn more about powering Monitor with Media & Author Lists.
Using the 'Favorites' Pin
You can designate any search, tag, RSS feed or saved view as a “favorite,” pinning that asset to the top of Monitor’s drop-down menu.
The ‘Favorites’ feature allows you to:
Quickly drop into Monitor and revisit content that is important to you
Stay organized when working on a team with a number of saved searches and views. The favorites feature is specific to you – which means that you can make sure the most important assets are at the very top of the menu.
Take advantage of a rapid and flexible workflow by defining an ordered list of your most important searches, Views, tags or RSS feeds.
How to use the ‘Favorites’ pin:
Click on the drop-down menu. Identify the assets you would like to favorite and click on the star icon that appears next to the search or other content.
To remove an item from the ‘Favorites’ list, simply click on the star icon again for that item.
Using Profile Previews to Vet Authors for Media Relations
You can easily retrieve important information about authors directly from the content stream. By clicking on the name of journalists and X (formerly Twitter) authors, a preview of their profile will appear within Monitor.
Profile previews offer a variety of informational highlights about that author, including:
Author/contact audience size
List of the recent articles that they have written
Interest topics (usually indicates their area of expertise)
Author social handles across other platforms, including YouTube, Instagram and TikTok
Contact information (email address, phone number, physical address and more)
To View a Profile Preview:
Simply click an applicable author name in the document card /mention in the content stream to open the profile preview.
Journalist or Media Contact Example:
X (formerly Twitter) Authors Example:
Duplicate Articles and Grouping Options
When content is syndicated across different sources, duplicate articles can appear in Meltwater. When we detect duplicates, we group them together. You have the option to change how duplicates are detected and grouped.
Open the duplicates settings from the content stream header
Make your selection for how duplicates should be grouped. Exact matches must have the same title and a very high degree of content similarity. Similar matches have less strict criteria - there can be some variance in titles and content.
Make your selection for whether to include duplicate articles when you select them from the content stream. When you use the option ‘Always ask,’ you will see the following confirmation pop-up for each time you select an article that has duplicates.
Note: your selection will be saved and remembered for when you access this View in the future.
Article Reach and Social Echo
At the bottom of each article's display, we also provide additional details about its audience via Reach and Social Echo.
Reach estimates the potential viewership of any particular article based on the number of monthly unique visitors to the specific source. For further details, please review our help center article on Reach here.
Social Echo provides you with an overview of the impact a particular editorial article had across social channels. Please review this article here for further details on the Social Echo feature and incorporating this information into your reporting dashboards.
Note: for editorial articles, ‘Views’ are estimated using a calculation, while for X posts, they are provided directly from X (formerly Twitter).
💡 Tip
Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.
Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.